NamedWork: City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development
(Nonfiction work)

Persons:

Reviewee: Pieterse, Edgar

Accession Number:

229218936

Full Text:

Pieterse, Edgar.

City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development.

London and New York: Zed Books, 2008.

188 pp.

ISBN: 9781842775417.

To social theorists, we grant the privilege of casting the world in
abstract terms. Large social forces--rationality, democracy,
urbanization, and globalization among others--shape and drive its many
transformations. By contrast, urban theorists carry the burden of making
space into place, time into history, and actors into persons. In urban
theory, the city must become real and that reality can only be conveyed
by attending to the temporal particularities of people and place.

Pieterse has written social theory. His viewpoint is highly
abstract, his examples are few and brief, his argument is formal and
syntactic, and a sense of place--and time--is absent. Nonetheless, he
offers a compelling, theoretical point-of-view. He is not, however,
doing urban theory, despite the book's title.

The purpose of this book is to portray an alternative theory of
sustainable urban development for the global South. Written for
"progressive urban development practitioners" (vii), Pieterse
argues that the mainstream approach to shelter and governance, as
represented by UN-Habitat and the Cities Alliance, is insufficiently
attentive to injustice, political exclusivity, and the way in which
power shapes development. Too much reliance on the market and too
stereotyped a view of the urban poor on the part of such institutions
leave fundamental conditions unaddressed.

Pieterse calls for greater attention to everyday urbanism, a world
of lived and ordinary realities as well as institutional projects. The
city and its slums must be seen in all of their "contradictory and
elusive complexity" (128) and political action must embrace rather
than resist the "chaotic, malfunctioning city of informality"
(108). The key phrase here is "constitutive heterogeneity."

Recognizing the potential for insurgent activism is the first step
in crafting urban policy and launching social movements. Insurgent
activists, however, cannot expect a swift, fundamental realignment of
the political economy. Pieterse advises, instead, a radical
incrementalism that proceeds from actually existing conditions and
establishes the basis for more radical change. This requires recursive
empowerment in which governance structures enable the marginalized to
assert control while themselves becoming more progressive. A vibrant and
radical democracy exists only when an inclusive political sphere and an
active public space nurture a rights-based discourse. Insurgent
activists should look for points of crisis, act transgressively to
de-stabilize existing power relations, and operate simultaneously in
multiple political domains (e.g., representative public forums,
neighbourhood development). Pieterse believes that politics should
celebrate dissension and "vigorous democratic contestation"
(162), not consensus.

The argument turns practical when Pieterse labels urban planning as
the "primary institutional entry point for advancing an alternative
urban agenda" (151). He promotes a typology of planning schema and
claims that planning is "thick with potential to be mobilized for
democratic engagement on questions of urban transformation" (159).

Pieterse's rich theoretical perspective champions the poor,
calls for more justice in the world, and urges a deeper
democracy--values which most readers, I suspect, can embrace. The value
of his perspective hinges on its internal consistency and its political
feasibility. I find both problematic. As regards the former, it was
never clear to me how Pieterse reconciles the chaos and dissension he
admires with the need for slum-dwellers to find security and for
government agencies and nonprofit organizations to mount programs and
deliver services. He has a romantic view of contestation and
indeterminacy, a position that works better theoretically than in
practice. And it seems contradictory to his core argument to embrace
urban planning, a state practice that is congenitally incapable of
incorporating the fluid contingency of everyday particularities.

As for the connection between this theory and the reality of slums,
Pieterse avoids "testing" his ideas against the
particularities of place, people, and institutions. His theoretical
argument unfolds with only the briefest of allusions to real places and
times. And, despite the claim that his audience is urban development
practitioners, he provides almost no practical advice.

As social theory, the book has value. One reads City Futures for
the author's theoretical agility and compassion for the oppressed,
but not for its correspondence with the political possibilities inherent
in a favela in Rio or a refugee camp in Amman. Pieterse has left to his
readers the task of turning social theory into urban theory.